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| David Bowie, holding a book on Buster Keaton to his face (1975) |
Fans of David Bowie know he was a genius in his art and person, with his theatricality, his intelligence, his music and costumes. Fans of David Bowie know he was a genius in his art and person, with his theatricality, his intelligence, his music and costumes. If you like the song "Ashes to Ashes," the video is worth a revisit, and you may enjoy thoughts I share below.
I find David Bowie to be an easy hero because, as Fox writes in David Bowie as art school, he "shared his finds with anyone who would listen. It’s the closet teacher in me, he once said. I love introducing people to new things."
His artistry and literariness are admirable. He was experimental, thoughtful, and sublime; these qualities seeped into his words that how he lived his life on earth.
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| Bowie on set of The Man Who Fell to Earth |
Today I woke up and something inside of me wanted to connect with David Bowie, the dearly departed. On my drive this morning, these lyrics from 1980 popped in my head, Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom's a junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low. If you know Bowie's 1969 "Space Oddity," you'll catch the reappearance of Major Tom two decades later in Bowie's 1990 "Ashes to Ashes," though he seems to have had a bit of a bad go since we last heard of him.
Bowie reveals that self-referentiality in any body of work is always a place to contemplate the making of meaning. David Robert Jones, aka David Bowie, was an avid reader. In interviews, he would refer to Roland Barthes, the literary theorist par excellence. (The French lit PhD in me couldn't help but love David Bowie.) Then, he was alluding to French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean Genet with his song title "The Jean Genie" (both these literary stars, Barthes and Genet, were considered the most holy and cutting-edge in the French department at Emory University. Like I said, Bowie is my easy hero).
In terms of this mise en abyme--or self-referentiality--the Wikipedia entry on "Ashes to Ashes" does a fantastic job of describing what's going on in the song, as there are so (too) many layers in each line of this song:
"Instead of a hippie astronaut who casually slips the bonds of a crass and material world to journey beyond the stars, the song describes Major Tom as a 'junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low.' This lyric was interpreted as a play on the title of Bowie's 1977 album Low, which charted his withdrawal inwards following his drug excesses in America a short time before, another reversal of Major Tom's original withdrawal 'outwards' or towards space.
The final lines, 'My mother said, to get things done, you'd better not mess with Major Tom,' have been compared to the verse from a nursery rhyme: 'My mother said / That I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood.
Bowie himself said in an interview with NME shortly after the single's release, 'It really is an ode to childhood, if you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It's about space men becoming junkies (laughs).'"
The theatricality of Bowie made his career so wildly experimental and prolific; each phase can be likened to one of Picasso's. Here in the official video of "Ashes to Ashes," the Englishman beautifully, fantastically, incarnates Pierrot, the stock character from the Commedia dell'Arte of the 1500s who was appropriated and reappropriated in the French theatrical tradition--to the point that the mime is known (even by Italians) by the French version of the original Italian name, Pedrolino.
With this lyric, one hears the back-up vocals, the "dead-pan and chanted background voices," of "whoa-oh" that follows and echoes the lead in a striking contrast that, to me, is almost ironic.
And now, for our listening & viewing pleasure:
I am just speculating but it seems that Major Tom, who turned junkie, could be taken as a reminder to not get involved in drugs. Although, when it comes to advising against doing drugs, I personally can't help chuckling thinking of one of my favorite lines from the British film, Love Actually, where Billy, the rock star-wannabe character who just had a break with a number one hit, gives the following advice to the camera and audiences at home. Brief pause for a comical interlude:
Bowie reveals that self-referentiality in any body of work is always a place to contemplate the making of meaning. David Robert Jones, aka David Bowie, was an avid reader. In interviews, he would refer to Roland Barthes, the literary theorist par excellence. (The French lit PhD in me couldn't help but love David Bowie.) Then, he was alluding to French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean Genet with his song title "The Jean Genie" (both these literary stars, Barthes and Genet, were considered the most holy and cutting-edge in the French department at Emory University. Like I said, Bowie is my easy hero).
In terms of this mise en abyme--or self-referentiality--the Wikipedia entry on "Ashes to Ashes" does a fantastic job of describing what's going on in the song, as there are so (too) many layers in each line of this song:
"Instead of a hippie astronaut who casually slips the bonds of a crass and material world to journey beyond the stars, the song describes Major Tom as a 'junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low.' This lyric was interpreted as a play on the title of Bowie's 1977 album Low, which charted his withdrawal inwards following his drug excesses in America a short time before, another reversal of Major Tom's original withdrawal 'outwards' or towards space.
The final lines, 'My mother said, to get things done, you'd better not mess with Major Tom,' have been compared to the verse from a nursery rhyme: 'My mother said / That I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood.
Bowie himself said in an interview with NME shortly after the single's release, 'It really is an ode to childhood, if you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It's about space men becoming junkies (laughs).'"
The theatricality of Bowie made his career so wildly experimental and prolific; each phase can be likened to one of Picasso's. Here in the official video of "Ashes to Ashes," the Englishman beautifully, fantastically, incarnates Pierrot, the stock character from the Commedia dell'Arte of the 1500s who was appropriated and reappropriated in the French theatrical tradition--to the point that the mime is known (even by Italians) by the French version of the original Italian name, Pedrolino.
"I've never done good things
I've never done bad things
I've never done anything out of the blue"
With this lyric, one hears the back-up vocals, the "dead-pan and chanted background voices," of "whoa-oh" that follows and echoes the lead in a striking contrast that, to me, is almost ironic.
And now, for our listening & viewing pleasure:
"My mama said to get things done you better not mess with Major Tom."
I am just speculating but it seems that Major Tom, who turned junkie, could be taken as a reminder to not get involved in drugs. Although, when it comes to advising against doing drugs, I personally can't help chuckling thinking of one of my favorite lines from the British film, Love Actually, where Billy, the rock star-wannabe character who just had a break with a number one hit, gives the following advice to the camera and audiences at home. Brief pause for a comical interlude:
In all seriousness, and in self-reflection, Bowie captures the problem with drugs in "Ashes to Ashes"--a suggestive title no matter which theme you hear in the song lyrics: "Time and time again I tell myself, I'll stay clean tonight."
There is much one could say about the video of "Ashes to Ashes," the most expensive music video production at the time due to the solarized light and multiple locations. The threads that tie the fragments of identity one to the other, theatrical to real self (which is which?) are interesting. The unmasked Bowie is seen in a padded room of psychological interrogation, disturbance, and isolation, where he alternately sits in a solitary chair or curled up, huddling in the corner. Or how about the chair in the kitchen. Out and about with other characters, he is in costume, like most of us. The references to being a junkie are reflected in an alienistic connection through the video's images of him tied via tubes to a machine, which has taken the place of---or stands in for---one's connection to a womb, to drugs, to the guitar... basically, the connection to whatever one attaches to--life even--which could BREAK any second. Major Tom is the falsity of any of our attachments that help us to somehow "function" in life--but which are ultimately a horrifically artificial construction.
And as for this BREAK in connection, we go back to Space Oddity: "Planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do"
Again, the work of artists who involve self-referentiality is so rich as their own oeuvre suggests a network of meaning and offers insight to one's own limitations (and hopes for transcendence). "That's the terror of knowing what this world about, watching some good friend scream 'Let me out!'" as he sings with Freddie Mercury (Queen) in "Under Pressure" (1982).
Jumping forward to the new millennium now. Though I am no connoisseur of this album, and probably will never be, for various reasons, I find this review of David Bowie's The Next Day super thoughtful, purely as a fan and someone who is wearing an earring of Ziggy Stardust's face today. The Next Day was his 24th and penultimate album, released in March 2013. The first single of the album, "Where Are We Now?", had been released on itunes on January 8th, 2013, his 66th birthday. David Bowie had been silent for over a decade (with some rumors of ill health). As Upcut writes so perfectly in this review: "January 8 was a Tuesday. We awoke to headlines that made us rub our sleepy eyes in disbelief. Bowie had stolen in like a thief in the night, uploading a new single on his 66th birthday (“Where Are We Now?”) and announcing the March release of an album (The Next Day) that had been recorded in conditions of Freemason-esque secrecy."
The key terms used in the aforementioned article, whether by Bowie, Visconti (long-time producer of Bowie's work), or Upcut are worth isolating, suggesting a grander meaning and matrix to these themes, and at this moment of his life:
misdirection vulnerability "blistering rock" melancholia old haunts faded memories mortality honesty disclosure
"Bowie has a way of composing lyrics in non-linear fragments, but with manifest emotion within those fragments, so that the finished song seems to apply both to him and to mankind as a whole. He’s anxious. It’s an anxious world. He feels alone. The world is a lonely place."
Where are we without artists like Bowie? If you listen to lyrics on this 2013 album you'll hear Bowie critique the ersatz celebrity of reality TV. As Uncut writes of his perspective in this review, "This is Stepford Wives territory: celebrities with no lights on inside, menacing, robotic, inhuman. Bowie, losing patience with them, portrays them as a shamed, scared tribe huddling together in tight packs, bonded by paranoia, with radiant smiles but vacant eyes, and with – get this – 'child wives' in tow. 'We will never be rid of these stars, but I hope they live forever,' he concludes with derision."
There is much one could say about the video of "Ashes to Ashes," the most expensive music video production at the time due to the solarized light and multiple locations. The threads that tie the fragments of identity one to the other, theatrical to real self (which is which?) are interesting. The unmasked Bowie is seen in a padded room of psychological interrogation, disturbance, and isolation, where he alternately sits in a solitary chair or curled up, huddling in the corner. Or how about the chair in the kitchen. Out and about with other characters, he is in costume, like most of us. The references to being a junkie are reflected in an alienistic connection through the video's images of him tied via tubes to a machine, which has taken the place of---or stands in for---one's connection to a womb, to drugs, to the guitar... basically, the connection to whatever one attaches to--life even--which could BREAK any second. Major Tom is the falsity of any of our attachments that help us to somehow "function" in life--but which are ultimately a horrifically artificial construction.
And as for this BREAK in connection, we go back to Space Oddity: "Planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do"
Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead
There's something wrong
Can ya hear me Major Tom
Can ya hear me Major Tom
Can ya hear me Major Tom
Can you... hear/here am I floating on my tin can
Far above the moon
Planet earth is blue
and there's nothing I can do
Again, the work of artists who involve self-referentiality is so rich as their own oeuvre suggests a network of meaning and offers insight to one's own limitations (and hopes for transcendence). "That's the terror of knowing what this world about, watching some good friend scream 'Let me out!'" as he sings with Freddie Mercury (Queen) in "Under Pressure" (1982).
Jumping forward to the new millennium now. Though I am no connoisseur of this album, and probably will never be, for various reasons, I find this review of David Bowie's The Next Day super thoughtful, purely as a fan and someone who is wearing an earring of Ziggy Stardust's face today. The Next Day was his 24th and penultimate album, released in March 2013. The first single of the album, "Where Are We Now?", had been released on itunes on January 8th, 2013, his 66th birthday. David Bowie had been silent for over a decade (with some rumors of ill health). As Upcut writes so perfectly in this review: "January 8 was a Tuesday. We awoke to headlines that made us rub our sleepy eyes in disbelief. Bowie had stolen in like a thief in the night, uploading a new single on his 66th birthday (“Where Are We Now?”) and announcing the March release of an album (The Next Day) that had been recorded in conditions of Freemason-esque secrecy."
The key terms used in the aforementioned article, whether by Bowie, Visconti (long-time producer of Bowie's work), or Upcut are worth isolating, suggesting a grander meaning and matrix to these themes, and at this moment of his life:misdirection vulnerability "blistering rock" melancholia old haunts faded memories mortality honesty disclosure
"Bowie has a way of composing lyrics in non-linear fragments, but with manifest emotion within those fragments, so that the finished song seems to apply both to him and to mankind as a whole. He’s anxious. It’s an anxious world. He feels alone. The world is a lonely place."
Where are we without artists like Bowie? If you listen to lyrics on this 2013 album you'll hear Bowie critique the ersatz celebrity of reality TV. As Uncut writes of his perspective in this review, "This is Stepford Wives territory: celebrities with no lights on inside, menacing, robotic, inhuman. Bowie, losing patience with them, portrays them as a shamed, scared tribe huddling together in tight packs, bonded by paranoia, with radiant smiles but vacant eyes, and with – get this – 'child wives' in tow. 'We will never be rid of these stars, but I hope they live forever,' he concludes with derision."
